


Tell Him Hello For Me

by Tmae



Category: DragonFable
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 23:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7820803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tmae/pseuds/Tmae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Homesickness can be hard to deal with. Reunions can be hard to face when you don't know how they'll go. The hero finally passing on a message they were given might help fix both those problems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Homesick

_Homesick (noun)_   
_(adj. homesickness)_   
_An acute sadness or longing for one’s home and family caused by a period of separation_

* * *

Homesickness had a tendency to strike when he least expected it. And it had a tendency to strike _hard._  
One moment he would be fine, his mind on the present moment, happy as can be, and the next his gut would clench up with nausea, his eyes cloud with unshed tears, his throat tightening and breathing becoming difficult and all he would be able to think would be _Home. Home. Home. I want to go home._

Sometimes he could identify the things which set if off, but that rarely did any good. So _few_ of them were things he could ever _hope_ to do anything about, to control.

He couldn’t control if there were smells wafting down the street or hanging in the empty air of buildings that reminded him of home

_(Sometimes bacon and eggs and for half a second he’s in the Knife and Spork. Sometimes the musty smell of old books and he’s in Warlic’s office. Sometimes… sometimes something, some combination of something metallic, something watery, something cold, that resembles but never quite matches an indescribable scent that makes him think for just a moment he could look to the side and out of a window and see the vast expanse of space stretching out before him.  
Those times are the worst of the lot)_

or if someone had a stutter and his name came out just a little bit different, sounding like a name he hasn’t heard in oh so many years

_(It never is though. It never is the name he thinks he might have heard, because the only one that remembers that name now is him)_

or if, just out of the corner of his eye, he sees dark skin and blond hair and maybe even a red scarf, making his heart skip a beat and his legs stop for a moment so that he can check if he just walked past a mirror.

_(He never has)_

He especially couldn’t control if he heard a voice that sounded _achingly_ familiar but turned out to be someone else.

_(and it’s always someone else. Always. Some days he wonders if he’ll ever find the friends he hasn’t found yet, wonders if he missed his chance to find them long ago)_

It was rare that he knew what caused it, though. Rare that he could pinpoint what it was around him making homesickness well up.

He had his ways of handling it. Closing up the shop for the day. Locking himself in his room in the tower. Sometimes the room alone could help. He had a lot of things in there that were either salvaged from some of the things that survived the Reset, or were replicas as close as he could match them.

There’s an energy blade rack in the corner, but not a single one of the blades is a survivor of the Reset. He made them all himself, and they’re not even close to as good as the real thing.

_(He’s a weaponsmith now, certainly, and he’s good at it. But these are replicas from a fading memory and he wasn’t an energy blade engineer back then. He was a pilot, a mechanic sometimes if needed. Give him a mecha, a starship, he could work with those. Energy blades were a different story.  
Sometimes he wishes he’d taken Energy Blade Engineering back when he was a student. He’d probably have learned some stuff that would be useful now)_

But, good as the real thing or not, they are the closest thing to those weapons of old that he has. And sometimes he’d use them, keep his skills sharp, for all that he’s pretty much a non-combatant these days. It felt a dishonour to the memory of those that _taught_ him how to wield an energy blade in the first place to let himself forget it now that he’s the only one that remembers.

_(He does have a real energy blade. Just one, locked in a small box hidden under his bed. It’s not his blade, he never uses it. He had always planned to return it to its rightful owner when he met them again, but they had been so different…  
…he hopes one day he’ll have the courage to give it back, even if they won’t know that that is what he’s doing)_

So. Homesickness. He knows it, he’s dealt with it often enough, but something about _this_ time feels different somehow.

There’s a stinging behind his eyes, a swirling in his gut, a tightness in his throat. And this time, he knows without a shadow of a doubt _exactly_ what brought it on.

“…Cysero?” the hero sounds uncertain and concerned. He can’t blame them – he’s pretty sure that he’s been standing stock still and expressionless for at least a few minutes. It’s not the sort of response you expect, passing on a message like that.

“Thank you,” the words leave his mouth before he even realises that he wants to say them and he can feel a massive smile splitting across his face. It almost feels like part of a weight has been lifted from his shoulders and _gosh_ but his heart feels inexplicably _lighter_ “Thank you, thank you, _thank you._ I…you…you have no idea how much hearing that… _thank you,”_

Words abruptly aren’t enough. When words fail, you turn to action. At some point during his rambling thanks he had ended up holding onto the hero’s hand with both of his but that isn’t _enough_ action to convey what he’s trying to convey so he pulls them into a hug.

_“Thank you_ , hero,” he says again, totally unable to convey just _how much_ what they passed on _means_. He wonders if there are even words to describe this depth of thanks.

And then he realises that he’s still hugging them and _yipes_ personal space, he’s trying to show gratitude, not make them uncomfortable, so he pulls away.

“I didn’t do anything special,” the hero insists, looking somewhat embarrassed. “I just passed along a message,”

He shakes his head, grin feeling like it’s going to be permanently plastered there forever, still unable to find words for his sheer _thankfulness_. It’s rather amazing how much three small words can do, but, well, a message like _that_ after five thousand years of thinking you were alone? Maybe someone, somewhere, could come up with the words to describe that, but right here, right now, he can’t.  
So he shows it in his actions instead, opening his arms in a suggestion and the hero looks like they want to roll their eyes but open their own arms in an indication that it’s okay.

He all but _whoops_ as he scoops them up in another hug, spinning them around with unrestrained glee and if the laughter he can hear is any indication, they don’t mind it.

Throughout it all, three words have echoed through his head.

_Kordana says hello._


	2. Reunite

_Reunite (verb)_  
_(past tense: reunited, present tense: reuniting)_  
 _To come together again after a period of separation or disunity_

* * *

 

He’s known about the Ruins of Kordana for years. He knows where pretty much every remnant of the world before the reset is, he made an effort to track down as much as he could, every scrap of information about things which survived unchanged.

He’s heard the stories about the Ruins as well, heard of the dangers and traps and strange metal monsters, the voice of a woman that those brave enough to venture in could sometimes hear.

_(“A ghost,” they whisper to each other when they speak of the place, “a spectral guardian of a place you are not to tread, a place left by long gone people.”  
They do not know just how right and yet how wrong they are)_

He’s never visited though. Never once in all the years he has known of the Ruins has he been able to make himself go. The place is called the Ruins of Kordana for a reason, after all, and he couldn’t bring himself to go just in case the ruins were also a grave, hadn’t been able to face the possibility of going and finding Kordana gone or not herself. Schrodinger’s Cat, in a way - or perhaps Schrodinger’s AI would be more appropriate.

It is one matter to see a friend after the Reset who does not remember him. It is another entirely to face the loss of one, let alone the loss of another survivor.

_(True, he had never known Kordana well. Their acquaintanceship had been brief; nothing but scattered snatches of conversation over commlinks on battlefields in truth. But he had still known her, and she had known him, and it would be a painful loss if it occurred. Better to avoid it)_

But now he knows that she is alive. She is alive and _remembers_ and _he is not alone._

So here he stands, in the humid air of Sho’nuff Island, outside what is now mostly an overgrown, rusting hunk of metal but was once a mighty war machine.

There is a wide, gaping hole torn in the hull and he can’t help but to wonder what caused it.

_(An enemy attack before the Reset? The Reset itself, trying to ‘fix’ the mecha? Perhaps it was the crash, or perhaps it was an animal on this island.  
Does it even really matter?)_

He brushes a hand against shorn and twisted metal as he approaches the entrance and smiles when he sees the working gears and mechanisms on the inside. It has been a long time since he has seen anything of that nature. He stands like that for a moment, one hand against the edge of the torn open entrance and eyes focused on the motion of the mecha’s inner workings. He’d forgotten how calming the rotation of gears and levers could be.

_(There may be the smallest flutter of pride at the sight too – Lorithian engineering, still functioning after the complete rewrite of the universe and five thousand years of total neglect. They had flourished as much as they had before the Shadowscythe for many reasons and not least among them was that they had some of the greatest engineering minds in the system)_

Eventually, he sighs, and crosses the threshold. Somehow, despite the vast opening into the jungle outside, the air inside the mecha feels cooler and less humid. He glances to the working mechanisms again, and then to a vent in the ceiling, and smiles.

There are broken, scattered remains of robots all over, security drones and repair bots alike. For a moment, he almost feels like he has been transported back in time, to a heavy battlemech overrun by Shadowscythe – and then the marks in the metal casing are not the scorched slashes of energy blades or the jagged gashes of claws. They are the clean cut marks of a blade, a blade that he knows, and the moment passes.

A security camera flickers on as he approaches the hard light bridge, the whirring of the internal mechanisms amplified both by the relative silence of the surrounding and the disuse – were it maintained, those sounds would be silent – and a voice echoes out just as he steps off it.

“Hello, Commander,”

_(Kordana’s voice is somewhat ethereal in the emptiness of this place. The voices of mecha AI were always carefully designed – just firm enough to grab the pilots attention in the heat of battle but soft enough not to be aggravating, each with the slightest differences between them to differentiate between AI but to maintain trained-in responses to the voice regardless of the AI present. Age is taking its toll on Kordana and it shows in her voice. There are edges of static to it, the slightest jump between the syllables of her words)_

Her hologram is waiting for him when he steps into the command centre, blue and just faintly flickering, exactly how he remembers her.

“It’s been a long time,” she says, holographic eyes flickering up and down over him, as though she is taking in his appearance despite the fact that they both know she has already catalogued it through the surveillance system.

“Indeed it has,” he answers, a soft smile on his face and a warmth in his chest “Long enough that I happen to not be a commander anymore,”

Her eyes twinkle – _literally_ twinkle, an adjustment to her projection to imitate the result of an emotion in a way she can express it – as her eyes flicker up and down his body again, before she meets his gaze with a raised holographic eyebrow (or as close as can be managed with his hair blocking it).

That is the moment that he realises he has shifted his posture unconsciously, had perhaps done so the moment he entered the room.

His spine has straightened, his shoulders rolled back. His legs are shoulder width apart and his hands are clasped behind his back.

“Are you sure?” Kordana asks him, lips quirking up into a smirk.

He laughs a little, forcing his shoulders to relax and letting one arm swing forward to hang at his side while the other comes up to run through his hair.

“I guess some habits are hard to break,” he says.

“Indeed, they are,” she replies, smirk morphing into a grin.

She steps forward and holds out a hand, arm extended, palm upwards, as though for him to take. For a split second, he almost reaches out to grab it before remembering that he would pass straight through her holographic form. The delighted look on her face tells him that she didn’t miss the hastily aborted movement. He has a feeling that she had hoped he would do that.

“Come, _Commander_ ,” she says, stressing the title with almost a challenge for him to deny it again, “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, I think,”

 _Yeah,_ he thinks, following her as she puts on the appearance of walking through the hallways of the mecha, occasionally disappearing and reappearing briefly as she jumps from projector to projector, probably leading him to some still – at least partly – intact break room or quarters.  
_Yeah, we have._


End file.
